I've started playing in tournaments this season, and have a question regarding discs. I saw in another thread (I can't remember which one ) that for legal play a disc has to be clearly marked with ink or something that won't affect the flight of the disc for it to be legal for tourney play.

What kind of marking is considered good enough? I play with a couple dyed discs I bought from online retailers, and almost all my other discs are hotstamped from my local club. The only real markings denoting which disc is which is the little abbreviations on the underside of the flight plate like the VL for valkyrie. Is that sufficient, or do the discs played with in a tourney require the actual stamp from the manufacturer?

You really just need to sign your discs. That's enough of a custom mark to know that it's your disc. It's not something that hey are hardcore about checking at tournaments, but you basically can be called out on it. Which I've never seen happen

The abbreviation on the bottom of the disc definitely is not enough to fulfill the obligation from the marking your disc rule. The manufacturer does that to every disc, so it does not make it unique. I would argue that the dye job does the same thing, so the retailer dyes are pretty standard and many discs look quite similar.

The rule is really there to protect you, so that when someone throws the same disc you have thrown on the same hole, you walk up to the lie, and one is in the fairway and one has a terrible lie, you know whose is whose.

Also, signing your disc/putting your name in it is actually quite a bit of overkill for what the rule actually requires. While that is the most common method, it isn't necessary. Any marking will do. For example, an X or a couple of dots. I use this method b/c when I lose a disc, I like to have a clean split with no expectation of it coming back (since most don't anyway) and I also don't like marking up discs.

As it turns out I think I may have been asking the wrong question or misunderstood the rule. Either way your answers opened my eyes up. The "not my disc" wasn't a scenario I had imagined happening and I'm glad you brought that possibility to my attention.

The point I was trying to get at and horribly missed was more along the lines of proving that my disc is the pdga legal disc I'm claiming it to be...

I've never been called out on any of them, but I have no way of proving that they really are innova discs (all my discraft discs have some sort of name stamp on them somewhere). If someone did call me on it and me being unable to prove anything leaves me worried that I'd only have 3 discs to finish the tourney/round with.

How would that scenario play out? Is this really something I should be concerned with? I figure it wouldn't matter unless someone felt like being a toolbox. I'm not all that good and play in the rec division...

This happened ALOT when Wraiths and TeeRexes first came out in Star. Virtually all of them were red with a blue stamp. I've heard of multiple problems at that point where guys on different holes threw identical discs that landed near each other...

XvileX wrote:The point I was trying to get at and horribly missed was more along the lines of proving that my disc is the pdga legal disc I'm claiming it to be...

I've never been called out on any of them, but I have no way of proving that they really are innova discs (all my discraft discs have some sort of name stamp on them somewhere). If someone did call me on it and me being unable to prove anything leaves me worried that I'd only have 3 discs to finish the tourney/round with.

oh, i see -- the factory stamp and the words "pdga approved" are gone... that's a non-issue, don't worry about it.

XvileX wrote:The point I was trying to get at and horribly missed was more along the lines of proving that my disc is the pdga legal disc I'm claiming it to be...

I've never been called out on any of them, but I have no way of proving that they really are innova discs (all my discraft discs have some sort of name stamp on them somewhere). If someone did call me on it and me being unable to prove anything leaves me worried that I'd only have 3 discs to finish the tourney/round with.

oh, i see -- the factory stamp and the words "pdga approved" are gone... that's a non-issue, don't worry about it.

This scenario would be dropped onto the TD to bring up the approved discs spread sheet and find your disc. If that disc is not on that list, then it's illegal and you will get stroked for each time you used that disc.